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The Longest Journey

aka: Den lengste reisen, Den längsta resan, TLJ, The Longest Journey: D'un monde à l'autre, The Longest Journey: Najdłuższa Podróż, The Longest Journey: Remastered
Moby ID: 1439
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Description official descriptions

April Ryan is a struggling student artist in the year 2209, recently arrived in the big city of Newport. Lately she has been seeing strange, life-like dreams. Somewhere in the mountains, a mysterious white dragon talks to April, calling her the "mother of the future". When April wakes up, she dismisses the vision as a nightmare. However, an old enigmatic man named Cortez, whom April has spotted near her house before, unexpectedly tells her that she must face the reality in her dreams. Soon April learns that our reality is but one facet of a universe that consists of two parallel worlds: Stark, the world of science and technology, and Arcadia, the world of magic. Though raised in Stark, April possesses the ability of shifting between the two worlds, and must restore the balance in both of them before it is too late.

The Longest Journey is a third-person puzzle-solving adventure game. The player navigates April over pre-rendered backgrounds with fixed camera angles, interacting with people and objects through a simple point-and-click interface. The gameplay follows the traditional template introduced in LucasArts adventures, relying mostly on inventory-based puzzles and multiple-choice dialogues to advance the story. To help keep track of things, the game includes a diary, where April records her thoughts about important events, and a conversation log that records the text of every conversation.

Spellings

  • Бесконечное Путешествие - Russian spelling
  • 無盡的旅程 - Traditional Chinese spelling

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Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Windows version)

199 People (193 developers, 6 thanks) · View all

Producer
Lead Designers
Written By
Art Director
Lead Programmer
Programmers
Installer and Launcher
3D Studio Max Plug-Ins
Translation Tool
Randy
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 213 ratings with 17 reviews)

LONG, beautiful, but dated adventure game.

The Good
The Longest Journey has beautiful visuals, a good soundtrack, and a decent plot. It's a good solid point-and-click adventure and one of the only good 3D adventure games out there.

The Bad
The game is dated. The character models are very pixelated when blown up on my widescreen 22'' monitor. The dialog can get very long and tedious. The puzzles can be frustratingly random and hard. April Ryan, the main character, is a sarcastic whiny teenager.

The Bottom Line
I would recommend this game to others if they enjoy adventure, but would hope that this game gets remade to the standards of it's sequel Dreamfall.

Windows · by hvrsd hvrsd (1) · 2007

Great adventure until it reaches the end.

The Good
| Prelude |
Like any other adventure fan, I rushed to get this game after I saw it's potential for releasing interesting vibes and graphical pleasure... although took me a few years longer than I expected. After a full installation of 2+ gigabytes of space and no need for CD-ROM drive, I ran this game to great amazement, I wonder what my face looked like when I saw what I was missing for so long by constantly postponing its getting. It started promising, very promising and very cunning in its own veil of mystery, but it didn't take me too long to realise just how they managed to make a simple wanna-be-epic story out of this game and thus turning the screws into the opposite direction of 'good.'

| And a big + goes to... |

  • Promises -- this game doesn't save on promises, it promises more and more by the minute you play it. It builds up your expectation and suspense around you giving you more and more questions for you to satisfy your curiosity... but answers are sparse and occasionally turning very silly. Promises are vast, but expectations dust it fully away.
  • Female heroine -- a cute little female ball called April Ryan is one of the most unique characters that ever entered the stage of computer game protagonists, and as well as the story, her aura radiates promises of lots of fun during the gameplay. Sadly, she turns out just to be a little more stupid than any NPC you encounter along the way, ruining many neatly served situations along the way.
  • Visuals -- undoubtedly, visuals in this game have no flaws whatsoever, pre-rendered backgrounds feel alive and breathe alive. FMVs that look just bigger if not better are making its way on the scene equally nice, but aren't something to look forward to since game itself creates an amazing graphic experience.
  • Language -- vulgar and rather unexpected from a game, but neat fit from the call of reality. Dialogues are vivid and rather pointless, which is what we can hear everyday and that remarkably creates a booster for the atmosphere.
  • Text -- there's lots of text, and it's completely voice-acted. One wouldn't expect less from a game that spans across four CDs, though.
  • Locations -- this game has various of exotic locations and they're all as tempting as they are beautiful in its might of artwork. Starting location is especially amazing as it looks and feels not giving you the slightest hint of the journey you'll actually have to embark on.
  • Mouse cursor -- mouse cursor tends to lighten up whenever you can do something or look at something, or use something on something. This eliminates futile attempts of doing fully nonsense permutations when you are clueless about your next step.
  • Original ideas -- idea of actually splitting world of magic and world of science into two different yet connected worlds where people just act normally as they were raised (people from the world of science, like in our reality, would be afraid of something unknown or known as magic) is neatly created with lots of possibilities and... ah, promises.

    **The Bad**
    | And a li'l - goes to... |
  • Story -- although promising at start, it reaches its peak to something impossible on occasion and utilize its incompetence to create a perfect circle in the end.
  • Narration -- the entire story is actually your own narration, or call it story-telling. That automatically creates huge boundaries of possibilities. Perhaps that may not be the case in a game or especially in a work of fiction, but it lets you know some things for sure, like, if you're telling the game, then you certainly won't die anywhere in it, and you know you won't end up doing some prophesied deed or who knows what else you might do outside of those bonds. That sort of point sets a huge drawback on a story and makes possible sequel look even more silly if you will be playing it also somewhere before your storytelling time, or if not then it might seriously screw up the original making them incorrectly connected.
  • Music -- although music is what one might call very atmospheric and fits the situations on the plate, there are no rememberable songs even though there are so many to be found.
  • Natural selection -- making some bird talk might seem okay if all the other birds and animals could talk as well, otherwise, this just seems incredibly silly. Why would one bird be treated as something more and another as a simple animal.
  • Wannabe epic -- this game above all wants to build up to become some sort of epic, and by very trying so it erases most of the means that would make it mucho better.

    **The Bottom Line**
    An adventure game that makes a splendid presentation of how you can make a wrong turn even when you're equipped with all the means to create a masterpiece or a classic.

    • Windows · by MAT (240968) · 2012

    Enjoyable!

    The Good
    Really strong start, April soon starts having strange dreams which begin to manifest themselves in reality; the everyday life of an art student in 2209 Venice gets very strange. The story is good, there's two realms, Stark, a futuristic version of our own and Arcadia, a realm of magic and prophecy.

    The game is pretty arty, the lead Character April Ryan is after all an art student, as a result there are detailed and often very beautiful backgrounds. The voice acting is pretty decent, good job for the lead character, and is often very funny. The game has a gritty atmosphere, especially in the futuristic setting, expect plenty of swearing, one character swears nearly every other word, but it's nearly always in character.

    I won't go into the story too much, which I think is the games greatest strength, but The Balance, The Guardian, Shifting, Alltounge, the Vanguard and the Sentinels will all become very familiar. A fantastical story is delivered with a realistic edge. There's lots of dialogue, great storytelling, you'll learn about the history of the characters you’ll meet along the way. A few of the people you'll bump into - Brian Westhouse, the whiskey drinking and panama hat wearing chap you meet in Arcadia who's actually from your own world, there's Abnaxus, who exists in all times and places and has terrible trouble with his tenses, your best friends and fellow students from Venice, Charlie and Emma, and the three forest dwelling stick men.

    Bar what seemed to be an incomprehensible solution near the beginning the puzzles mostly make good sense.

    The Bad
    Conversations can drag out a little too long on occasions.

    Near the end of the game there's the odd encounter which is very easy to solve and doesn't really seem to fit with the game.

    The Bottom Line
    A very enjoyable experience, the story and world(s) really drew me in.

    Windows · by Jack Lightbeard (2685) · 2007

    [ View all 17 player reviews ]

    Discussion

    Subject By Date
    remake? hvrsd hvrsd (1) Jul 11, 2007

    Trivia

    1001 Video Games

    The Longest Journey appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

    April Ryan

    The publisher of The Longest Journey, Egmont Interactive, actually tried to turn April Ryan into a pop icon to match Lara Croft. To that end, they cast a real-life model for April -- 23 years old psychology student Katja Koopmann of Bremen, Germany -- and toured the major magazine and newspaper offices with her, dressed up like April and sputtering lines like “I find April sympathetic” with a somewhat forced smile. Once the PR machine runs, even mediocre game sales can’t stop it. On her way to media star, the virtual April next recorded a song -- a dance remix of the 80’s Depeche Mode tune The Balance -- and Katja lend her voice. Egmont spiced April’s image up with exceptionally stupid PR blurb like “I want everything! Above all, I want to show the people of your world something of the life here!” Generally ignored by the public, the song entered the stores on April 14th ‘00, and stayed there. The corresponding video clip was never played on the music channels, the song didn’t appear in the radio shows, and nobody bought the CD.

    Dreamweb

    The main character's name is April Ryan, just like Ryan in the game Dreamweb, also published by Empire Interactive Entertainment. And the plots of both games have some things in common (the hero who suffers from nightmares and must save a world he/she didn't even know existed in the first place).

    References

    • A reference to the Monkey Island series: April's pet toy is called Constable Guybrush. And yes, it's a monkey.
    • There are lots of references to sci-fi movies and fantasy themes. Most prominent are the references to Brazil, for instance, which takes place on a red tape-clogged insensitive world much like stark. Take a look at the lobby of the Church of Voltec, it's an exact replica of the Information Retrieval building on Brazil. Also the whole repairmen puzzle where they refuse to work on the grounds that it would require a specific form for them to do so is a spoof of the "Central Services" sequence in the movie. They are even dressed in the same way! There are many more, some more subtle than others.
    • Want Star Wars references? check out that strange metal ball on the entrance to The Fringe Café. It says "Death Star" click on it and April will spout famous lines related to it, like "Let's blow this thing and go home!" and she even tries to imitate the voices!

    Sales

    The Longest Journey was originally made only to be released in Scandinavia, but it then grew with the sales to cover Europe and the U.S. By June of 2001, The Longest Journey had sold 250,000 copies worldwide, 90,000 of which were in America.

    Version differences

    In order to preserve his foreigner condition, Cortez had his nationality changed from Spanish to French and was renamed "Corthez" in the Spanish version.

    Voice acting

    • The character Marcus, who only appears in the first chapter near the Fringe cafè, and only has two lines, was voiced by Ragnar Tørnquist, the director/lead designer of the game for the English release.
    • In the German pre-release demo version, April was voiced by German pop singer T-Seven known from the, at the time, successful Eurodance group Mr. President. In the final game, April was voiced by Stephanie Kindermann.

    Awards

    • Computer Gaming World
      • April 2000 (Issue #201) - Adventure Game of the Year
    • Gamespy
      • 2000 - Adventure Game of the Year
    • PC Gamer
      • 2000 - Adventure Game of the Year

    Information also contributed by -Chris, Agent 5, jeremy strope, Karthik KANE, kelmer, Stargazer and Zovni

    Analytics

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    • MobyGames ID: 1439
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    Contribute

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    Contributors to this Entry

    Game added by andyhat.

    iPhone, iPad added by MrMamen.

    Additional contributors: n-n, Robin Lionheart, curacao, Jeanne, JRK, Dec Ryan, Kabushi, Stratege, Zeppin, Laverne, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, MrMamen, FatherJack.

    Game added May 14, 2000. Last modified April 22, 2024.